The street where we lived.........

The Dutch fellow who contacted me last week, looking for his old main squeeze, made this little film for me.

When I told him where I used to live, he took his bike and rode it to my old neighborhood, and filmed it.
Needles to say it cracked me up that he filmed it while he was riding, thank God it's a one way street.

I had just mentioned to Wheelie what a mess the old cherry blossom trees would make every spring. How the housefraus would piss and moan every time the blossoms would fall off, and how they would come out with their brooms and sweep them up.

I thought the trees would have been cut down by now. But as you can see, they were pruned over the years, giving them a thick trunk and lighter branches. It's a nice coincidence that he filmed it when they were blooming too. To me these trees are so fresh in my memory.

When the trees bloomed it meant we could wear socks again, instead of our long stockings or sweat-type pants (under our skirts). To feel the warmer air on your bare legs again. Time to take off our woolies, the extra cotton knit undershirts. Time to go out in the field and pick flowers again, hunt for pollywogs and stickelbaars and salamanders. And make little nets to catch water fleas to feed our little pets.

The street hasn't changed much. The street is still made of bricks, although repaved many times.

We lived in the three story building on the right at the beginning of the video. Right above where those ladies are sitting outside, we were in the middle apartment on the corner.

In the late 80's the buildings were all renovated, which was a horrific event for my mom. They pretty much had to gut the buildings while they lived there, constant hammering and drilling, it drove her crazy. The noise and the dust. My mom and dust don't mix well.:>)


The low buildings on the left at the beginning of the video were special apartments for seniors.

It make me laugh out loud to notice the speed bumps in the street.

So many wonderful memories from those years we lived there.

I wrote a long blog piece about that time a while back, and accidentally deleted it. I wish I still had it. It was one of my more inspiring stories.

We lived here from 1953 until my parents finally moved to Zoetermeer about ten years ago.
I was about 6 when we moved here. Our family was one of the first to move into the street, the street was still not paved, I remember.

The large building on the corner at the end of the video used to be a bare piece of land for years. It was a perfect place to play, lots of dirt, small hills, mud. The boys used to "motor cross" on their bikes and scooters, we used to dig for worms and just generally run amok there. The rain would create wonderful little lakes with lots of mud. It was called "het landje" a small triangle of land. Once my youngest brother got himself stuck in the mud up to his elbows, and my mom, eight months pregnant had to drag him out. All the kids yelling and hollering, and telling her to PULL...

The first picture shows a birds eye view of the neighborhood before they built the houses. Our street was one of the three at an angle, in the middle of the picture you can see the triangle of "het landje"

The next picture shows the street in 1953, right around the time we moved there. And who knows, that "bakfiets" you can see might even have been my father, moving our stuff. Sure looks bare.

The third picture is lil ole me with my jump rope and my rubber boots on. My green coat, which my mom sewed from an old coat of hers. According to her I was very lonely in those days before the other families moved in.

The third picture shows the apartment my son and I lived in (upstairs, a two bedroom apartment) when we went back home in 1974.

You can clearly see how much the neighborhood has changed. From a street full of large families, and many children (last count we remembered about 25 of them), it went first to a street full of old people, then the foreigners moved in, then people from India, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and, I'm sorry to say, some riff raff from the inner city.

For my parents it became an unbearable place to live, with the drunken fights and the and loud parties, the strong potent cooking smells permeating the entire building.

The family downstairs started cooking onions every morning at nine o'clock. At first it was like: hmmm...someone is frying onions, yumm...but when mom discovered it was going to be a daily thing, it drove her nuts.

So next year this street and the streets around it will be torn down, just like the other streets in the neighborhood. It will make way for a new group of homes, more modern, more expensive.

My sister asked me the other day if I would come back and live in Holland again. I told her no way, it has all changed too much. It would be like living in a strange country.

But the memories will always make me smile.
I am so grateful to have had a happy and carefree childhood there in the Beverweerdstraat.

Thanks John for the extra effort of making the video.

SGMKJ!